James C. Liu's Weblog

Friday October 12, 2007

A great life remembered - Professor Virgil E. Schrock - Dept. of Nuclear Engineering - UC Berkeley

A Great Man - A Great Mentor

As a kid, you grow up thinking to yourself what you want to be when you get older. I never really had much preferences until high school. I was a pretty happy-go-lucky guy who, sometime around high school, wanted to really get into Applied Physics, like maybe Nuclear Engineering. Well, I was fortunate enough to get accepted into the Nuclear Engineering Undergraduate Program at the University of California at Berkeley, where I got a pretty interdisciplinary regimen of all the standard courses in Mechanical, Civil, Electrical, CompSci, and of course, Physics.

Around my junior year, I found a part time job up at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. A great workout since I often biked up the hill to work and biked back over Grizzly Peak in the evenings to Orinda to commute back home. It was in the course of working up there, writing Data acquistion software for the VAX which was hooked up to the Bevalac Particle accelerator that I bumped into my undergraduate advisor who was working on Polymorphous Silicon and enhancing the photo-electric effects (i.e. researching how to make a cheaper, better solar panel).

He wouldn't become my graduate adviser, but he did introduce me to an undergraduate Nuclear Engineering design contest hosted by the American Nuclear Society. The challenge that year was to analyze the feasibility of consolidated spent fuel rods in fission power plants. Simply, many older nuclear power plants today, have been storing their spent fuel rods in large, deep pools on-site. Utility companies have been charging into their base rate a decommissioning cost which includes spent fuel processing and burial costs. The US Gov't has been remiss in it's obligations to find a spent fuel storage facility in the last 40 years, although we've come close to selecting Yucca Mountain Nevada as a site. (But due to certain political obstacles and an uneducated public - there's been much opposition to the storage facility).

This political dilemma actually got me interested in looking at spent fuel consolidation. The problem looked simple at first. Utility companies wanted to know if it was okay to remove the spacing guides on the fuel pins, then bundle them closer together and therefore get more storage room out of their existing storage pools. This could extend the storage pool capacity for another decade or even two decades at most plants.

Prof. Virgil Schrock volunteered to sponsor any UC Berkeley bid into this design contest. His speciality was Nuclear Thermal Hydraulics - i.e. a fancy term for Heat Transfer and Fluid Mechanics in Reactor systems. I got together with a couple of classmates and we decided to look at this problem. We were against some stiff competition from some other big name schools from around the country, and from the get-go, Prof. Schrock was a no-nonsense guy and a tough taskmaster. He never gave us answers. Only questions. And to answer those questions required a lot of research. But I was good at this. I was resourceful and quick. Still, it took the better of our last year at Cal and early part of my summer to finish up the thesis and submit it to the judges. It was during that senior year and early in my involvement just to scope out the problem that I really found love of research and problem solving. So I decided I wanted to go to grad school. Prof. Schrock must have seen some potential in me and he helped me file for a Dept. of Energy Nuclear Engineering and Health Physics Fellowship - A free ride to grad school with full stipend. Plus -More- money than an NSF Fellowship. But only 4 - 7 of these would be granted in the US a year.

I did win one of these, and then the offers from MIT, U. of Wisconsin, Georgia Tech, etc. came rolling in. I took a few trips east, unfortunately in January, during a bitterly code winter, and I recall my face freezing upon exposure when I stepped out of my rental car in Madison. I decided then that East Coast cold or hot/muggy weather wasn't for me. I was going to stay at Cal and do my graduate work with Schrock. And not having gone much deeper into Nuclear Thermal Hydrualics, I thought at least the next few years couldn't be all that bad.

That was an interesting last semester senior year. I had quite a few more discussions one-on-one with Prof. Schrock. He clearly became my mentor. Tough, disciplined, thorough to every technical argument. I was the young, bright kid who could grasp new technical concepts fast, but I lacked focus and dedication. I was an officer in one too many student societies, throwing BBQs weekly, sometimes, 3 times per week for fellow Engineering students. I was thinking how I could make a comfortable life for myself as a grad student working for Schrock and partying with my fellow students. Schrock had bigger plans for me - he wanted to challenge me mentally and bring out the potential of whom I could be so that whatever the task, I could meet it head on and do a good job.

Certainly, my own father, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from UC Davis was no academic or technical slouch. But as a Dad, he really has had no choice. He had to love me for being his son. And I never really disappointed him. I met every standard a Dad could really set. And while he did teach me how to labour hard doing physical chores like tilling soil/farming, fixing my own bikes and cars, and simple home improvement - all in the heat of the summer, he never forced me to reach deep and work at my true mental potential. Well, all that would change now that I had officially hooked up with Prof. Schrock.

I remember around June of my last semester as an undergrad when we'd already walked at commencement and effectively graduated, that I was finishing up the submission for the design contest. My two classmates had bailed on me and either gotten jobs for the summer or were taking time off back at home. I was on my own and Schrock's technical perfection really made me question why the heck I was doing this. He was critical on every point of analysis. He forced me to apply my software skills to develop a computer simulation of time-dependent two-phase flow for freshly spent fuel rods which would radiate more heat early after removal from a power-reactor. It was painful to get up at 6am, commute in on BART, then not get home until late at night, sometimes on the last train, then work at home to verify the code against hand analysis. I never imagined I would survive living on 6 hours of sleep a night for the nearly a month of constant analytical work I had to do. And all the while, I still kept my part time jobs as a dishwasher and a bike-shop mechanic.

I came up with quite a few terms for Schrock at the time. "Hard nose" and "Slave driver" were the more polite ones. I even had doubts sometimes if I wanted a graduate adviser this tough. But at the end of 4 weeks of "finalizing", the submission was truly something I was proud of. Schrock had indeed been tough, but always supportive. His criticisms were back breaking, but always constructive. When I was ready to give up, he would give me the idea to pursue that would bring the work to the next level of analysis. Now, with the final package bundled and ready to ship off to the judges, I was more proud than any of the hand-made fishing rods I used to craft starting in high school. We submitted the simulation software, the written analysis and results that showed for at least a pool similar to the one at PG & E's Diablo Canyon facility, spent fuel rod consolidation was feasible. I actually believed it was on par with anything in the industry. It was on par with any graduate work as well. And I remembered that Schrock was also proud of our work.

Suffice it to say, that we kicked butt that year and took 1st place in the undergraduate category. I made the presentation in Washington, D.C. and received the award for our team. Professors from other schools were there and very impressed with our work. The comments I received were that it was impressive work, good enough to win the graduate student category perhaps. And what really impressed me was when they asked me who my research sponsor was. I told them: Virgil Schrock, not even thinking it was someone they would know. But they all said, "Ahh! You're one of Virgil's kids..." as if award-winning work was a standard output for anyone working with Schrock. I realized then that working with Prof. Schrock would mean working at a wholly new world-class level. It would be tough, but it was something that I wanted to know if I could complete.

I graduated in 1993 from UC Berkeley with a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering. I was so privileged to have had the opportunity to work with a man who, over the years, shaped me mentally and disciplined me as a scientist. For a man who contributed so greatly to the understanding of science starting more than 5 decades ago, retiring and becoming emeritus before the Internet really became widespread, I am amazed at the number of hits Google provides when searching his name. Working with Virgil Schrock and graduating with distinction from Berkeley opened many doors for me. I did a Post-Doc in Turbulent Convection and heat transfer at Tokyo Tech, then found easy employment as a consultant deploying Trading Floors and Derivative Risk Management Systems for Tokyo Stock Exchange members. It gave me the skills to then easily come back to work at Sun Microsystems and do what seems like a completely different job than the what my degree prepared me to do. The truth, however, is that I still apply the same academic skills, discipline and tenacity that Virgil Schrock instilled in me starting nearly 2 decades ago.

Because of Prof. Schrock, I learned as much as I could and more; I experienced scientific understanding as deeply as I could and more; and I was able to contribute to man's body of technical knowledge as much as I could and more. No person could have had a better guide in life than I did.

Above: Picture taken of myself (left), Virgil Schrock (mid), and my Dad (right) at Graduate commencement at Berkeley 1993. I still remember my Dad dressing up in his robes as well to accompany me. Prof. Schrock has just changed out of his robes. It was warm that day. My Mom took the picture. Prof. Schrock is survived by his Wife, Mrs. Ginny Schrock, and two children and quie a few grand children. My own son and daughter (7 and 5 years old) still sleep with the stuffed beanie baby Felix Cat and the Baby Bunny that I think Mrs. Schrock picked out and sent us when they were born. October 12, 2007 12:47 PM PDT Permalink